Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 13, 2010

Picasa Web Integrates with Picnik

Picasa Web Albums added an option that lets you edit photos in Picnik, the online photo editor acquired by Google in March. After clicking on the "Edit" button, Picasa Web Albums uploads the photo to Picnik and opens Picnik in a pop-up box.

Picnik is still a Flash application and it doesn't load quickly, so you have to wait at least 10 seconds until you can use it. The online photo editor doesn't have all the features that are available in Picasa, but there's an useful "auto-fix" option similar to the "I'm feeling lucky" button from Picasa, you can crop photos, repair red-eye flaws, remove color casts automatically and fix exposure.

The nice thing is that you no longer have to sign in to Picnik and that the changes can be saved to Picasa Web Albums after you click "save to my album", but that's nothing new. Flickr has been offering a similar feature since 2007.

"Picnik's rich editing tools are now integrated into Picasa Web Albums allowing you to experience them without ever having to leave your account. As long as you're using Picasa in one of the Picnik supported languages, just click 'edit' from the edit drop down menu or from the new handy Picnik icon. Then, Picnik away by applying an effect, adding a sticker, or exploring your own creative path with advanced tools. When you are done editing your photo, save back to your album by either replacing the existing image or making a new copy," suggests Google.

I expect that Picnik will be rewritten as an HTML5 application, so that it can have a better performance and properly integrate with Picasa Web Albums. Instead of opening the editor in separate box, Picasa Web Albums should let you edit the photo in place.

9 comments:

Why do you think Picnik would be faster in HTML 5? I haven't seen any applications that are faster in HTML 5 than in Flash (I could be wrong). Picnik is a powerful application. I don't know that re-writing it would be a big speed bump.

Just like Youtube prefers Flash to HTML5, the same is for Picasa.For now Flash is better at doing image processing than HTML5, and don't expect that a HTML5 application loads quicker than a similar in flash too.I like H5 too, but it is jut a bit too early.

I like that PicasaWeb is catching-up to flickr; if I weren't so googly I'd probably be using flickr more. HTML5 would be nice, but more importantly would be integration with more printing services. In particular PNI Media - which does Walmart & Costco among others - would be the ultimate enhancement, and don't forget us Canucks up north!

Now that Google had integrated Picnik into Picasa, how the Flickr-Picnik partnership play out?

IMHO, I expect that Google would allow Flickr to continue to use Picnik for the following reasons:

1. After the recent bad publicity over Street view cars, I don’t think they would risk another but of bad publicity. 2. There is no point in cutting Flickr off, as given Yahoo’s resources, they would have easily build another image editor in 6 months 3. Google’s main rival is Facebook, not Flickr

However, I also expect that Picasa, with its “native” integration with Picnik, would enjoy a greater set of features from Picnik, compared to Flickr.